Illusory faces are remembered more than human faces

The contribution of subjective perceptual experience to visual memory is unclear. To measure that, here we took advantage of a nearly universal subjective visual experience, illusory face perception (“face pareidolia”) where the perception of veridical visual information (e.g. objects) is accompanied by an illusory face-like perceptual experience. As illusory faces activate both non-face and face-related mechanisms and as we assume that images recruiting more visual system resources are better remembered, we predicted that illusory faces will be remembered better than human faces. Our study (N=231) shows that illusory faces were remembered more than human faces and more than matched-control images not evoking illusory faces and this effect followed the illusory face amplitude. Interestingly, ResMem, a memorability-predicting artificial neural network successfully captured human faces vs outdoors image memorability sensitivity but not illusory face-related memorability sensitivity. Relying on a broadly shared illusory phenomenon, we demonstrate the contribution of subjective visual experiences to memory.